apps

Fortune media hound Mathew Ingram noted in May 2015, when Facebook’s Instant Articles format launched, that Big Blue saw it as “as a mutual exchange of goods, driven by the company’s desire to help publishers make their articles look as good as possible and reach more readers.” He went on to say:

But whenever you have an entity with the size and power of Facebook, even the simplest of arrangements becomes fraught with peril, and this is no exception. Why? Because a single player holds all of the cards in this particular game.

Around that time, Gawker’s Nick Denton, since brought low by a multimillion-dollar lawsuit loss you may have seen coverage about, went so far as to call the Facebook-publisher relationship not a distribution partnership but “abject surrender”:

So many media organizations are just playing to Facebook. They’re just catering to the preferences…expressed in some algorithm that nobody understands. It’s almost like we’re leaving offerings for some unpredictable machine god that may or may not bless us.

Almost a year after its launch, and a year’s worth of tweaks to the Instant Articles product, we have a more complete picture of the pros and cons.

Pros

Massive distribution open to many publishers
Following its closed launch with a limited amount of “partners,” including the New York Times and National Geographic, Facebook has opened the program to publishers big and small, in the U.S. and around the world, “giving every news organization the capability to publish their content on the social network,” according to Poynter.

WordPress plug-ins make it easier
After a rocky launch that required programmers to reformat every article especially for Facebook, the company was able to scale it to most new organizations through a WordPress plugin the company created, “essentially greasing the skids for mass adoption of the program among news organizations.” Per Poynter:

The plugin is being built in partnership with Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, and helps translate news stories to Facebook’s Instant Articles format. This removes a significant hurdle for news organizations.

New potential revenue streams
It’s no secret that magazines are continuing to fold and even digital-native sites can’t make the numbers work. We’ve also seen the rise of ad blockers and native/sponsored/branded content. Are content partnerships like these the answer, or at least an answer?

Cons

Only certain companies are seeing real benefits
BuzzFeed and Vox, to name two, are on board with the new format. Vox even hired media heavy hitter Choire Sicha to oversee its distributed partnerships (Facebook, Snapchat, Apple News and others, presumably). Per the WSJ, “Vox Media has long counted its own content platform as a key to its success. But now it says the future lies in platforms run by others, so it’s bringing in a digital media stalwart to help strengthen those ties.”

But others have yet to make hay from Facebook’s sunshine. As Fortune notes:

The media industry is in a “get big or go home” phase.

BuzzFeed and Vox are big, so they can play in Facebook’s Instant Articles world better than the smaller guys can.

It’s difficult (and costly) to track the audience
As AdAge reports, publishers have to pay more to track their audiences on distributed platforms. Yes, they get bigger distribution (theoretically, anyway), but ComScore apparently charges “$15,000, per platform, per year, to add tracking capabilities.” And six months post-launch, Apple News still doesn’t even have ComScore integration. This puts publishers in a tough position: In order to help their bottom lines, they want to reach the audience wherever the audience is, but doing so costs money they don’t have.

It’s not clear that publishers make money
Following on the point above, in the distributed content ad model, if you don’t know how much audience you have, you also don’t know how much revenue you stand to make. At this point, publishers are still crossing their fingers that this translates to revenue.

Jobs continue to be cut but not added back
Publishers are “re-allocating resources to build teams that produce content for specific social platforms,” per AdAge, but they’re cutting far, far more than they’re adding. Journalism is going through the kind of massive…transition, disruption, sea change, slaughter, whatever you want to call it, that is epic in scale. There are too many outlets that have closed up shop or gone through major layoffs to name. It’s especially chilling when digital-only publications like Mashable, IBT and Slant (just in the past couple of weeks) can’t even make the numbers work.

You may have begun your winter vacation last week, but while you were enduring awkward conversations with your extended family, the Time Inc. PR department was working overtime to convince the public that the magazine producer is thriving in this newfangled technological world of ours. All those olde timey magazines? Who cares? Time Inc. is making apps now. That’s right: apps. Everyone knows that apps are the future! Ever since 2008, which was six years ago, when the App Store launched, apps have been the future. But now Time Inc. is getting into the game, so watch out every other app, of which there were 25 billion on iOS as of May 2013! Clearly we have all—all of us in digital media, and, well, all of us everywhere around the world—been waiting to see just what kind of technology the minds at the magazine company Time Inc. will devise.

Time Inc. doesn’t just want to be known and just to operate as the publisher of popular magazines like Time, Sports Illustrated, InStyle and People any more. It wants to become a technology company too, launching its own products to rival the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce and even Tinder.

Does it now? I’ll bet those folks can do it! I mean, it wants to be a tech company. It wants to rival the biggest social networks on this planet. So it stands to reason that it can!

Ever since former owner Time Warner announced it was to spin off Time Inc. into a separately publicly traded company last year, Time Inc. has been making some loud noises that it’s not just a dusty old magazine publisher that doesn’t understand digital.

They’re making loud noises, people! About the assumption that they don’t understand digital just because their sites are still running on technology from the 1990s! Wha, wha, what was that? A loud noise, that’s what.

With so much change affecting the publishing industry—first with the move to web, then search, social and mobile—Time is saying “we don’t want to be surprised any more, we want to find ways to get ahead of that curve. They are working to get ahead of that curve and become a tech company.”

Oh, wow. They are working on being ahead of the curve to become a tech company! Did you hear that, all the other tech companies and websites? They are working on it!

M. Scott Havens, Time Inc.’s SVP of digital, told Business Insider “We are building [standalone] apps and businesses.”

No! They are building apps? Apps?! My god, apps! What a brilliant idea! Has anyone ever built—is it pronounced apps? Am I saying that right?

What! You’re telling me this team of hundreds was able to develop an app that updates once a week? Do they have push alerts? Because if this weekly app has push alerts…

The process started a year ago, when Time Inc. came up with the idea for the product last spring. By May, Time Inc. had 500 paying customers using the service (which, at $18.99 a month, isn’t cheap), giving it the confidence to push ahead with a full launch.

Holy moley! This once-a-week app took only a year to make! And they have 500 users! Yes, five hundred! Let’s see, 500 users times $19 each? Why, that’s almost $10,000 a year in revenue after only one year of development! So really it’s all profit, minus the roughly $5 million to $10 million in costs!

A “young guy” working on the Sports Illustrated editorial team recently had a great idea for an “utilitarian app,” which Havens describes as a kind of Tinder meets Yelp. The guy told his editor, who allowed him to work on the project (at the expense of his time working on Sports Illustrated) with Havens. The company is now working on a prototype.

Wait, what? A young guy had an idea? And they let him work on it?! Holy crap, this is a game changer. And it’s probably going to be more popular than Tinder and Yelp, because it meets them both, according to this one young guy.

Time Inc. is borrowing the tools (and buzzwords) of Silicon Valley with a fast, lean approach to product development. This “minimum viable product” has four digital product experts who work with people at the individual lifestyle magazine brands to develop new products in two-week cycles.

Oh, wow, they’re using Agile, Lean and MVP? I mean, “MVP”? Wow. Well, sorry digital companies, it’s over for you. Time Inc. has figured it out. They’ve hired four different experts, so…it’s kinda game over for everyone else.

Such a change in mindset and business focus requires a huge cultural reorganization. Processes are different, priorities change, even desk layout ought to be different than a traditional newsroom.

Wait, you’re saying that you just need to rearrange the desks in order to make this a digital company, not a “dusty old media” company? So easy! I’m not sure if the union will go for that, but they might just be right about the seating chart being the key to disrupting this whole industry.

Havens hints that everything from consumer apps, b2b technologies and content for watches, cars and refrigerators are all being considered.

Oh, wow. Is there anything this old magazine company that knows nothing about any of those industries can’t do?! Watch your back, all of those above-mentioned multibillion-dollar corporations that are also doing all of these things but with a working knowledge of their industries and without a legacy media business to run!

It’s easier for Time Inc. to adopt this approach now than it would have been a decade ago, though, said Reed Phillips, managing partner of media investment bank DeSilva & Phillips.

Yeah, totally! If they’d been able to develop social media a decade ago, they’d definitely have been ahead of the curve. Time Inc., your PR department makes it pretty clear that you have many great ideas (and plans!) on how to be an tech-industry leader. All I can say is good luck with that.

There is a reason that phones, tablets, minis, laptops and desktop computers all exist. Each does a different thing. Sometimes only a slightly different thing, but a different thing nonetheless. And with a few exceptions, we use different products and brands as we perform different tasks on these different devices, depending on what we’re trying to accomplish.

If you’re checking your Facebook feed, the difference between doing so on your iPhone, your iPad and your iPad mini isn’t apparent. But if you’re writing a message to a long-lost friend on Facebook, ideally you want to do so via your laptop or desktop, using a tactile keyboard, on the web. (And maybe you even want to write it first using a word-processing application.) If you’re trying to research Twitter trends or simultaneously monitor thousands of tweets, the Twitter mobile app just won’t cut it (not even Twitter’s website will cut it sometimes—just ask Tweetdeck). If you’re gaming, Candy Crush is fine on a phone, but if you want to play a graphics-intensive game, you’d be advised to do so using a heavy-duty desktop machine or a gaming console. Blog posts are easily tweaked on WordPress’s app, but I wouldn’t want to compose several thousand words by plunking them out on a virtual keyboard. I’d never want to watch Gravity on my phone.

On and on—you get the point. Or, rather, I will get to the point. Magazines are ideally meant to be enjoyed on paper at leisure. The long articles, the beautiful photos, the envy-inducing ads, the feel of the pages in the hand, the tearing out of things to remember. With the exception of some news journalism, very few brands work on absolutely all devices. TheNew York Times and Buzzfeed, to name two, do an exceptional job cross-platform. But even then, those in-depth, well-reported 10,000-word profiles that the Times does so well? I can’t sit still long enough to read them on the web, let alone while squinting and scrolling on a phone. Buzzfeed’s GIF-sticles? Good luck getting them to load and animate as quickly as you want them to on a tablet.

I’ve written before about how dismally magazine apps perform and tried to propose theories as to why that might be. But maybe it’s simpler than all that. Maybe it’s not more visibility in the app store or better PR or more intrusive update alerts or a consistent user experience. Maybe it’s as simple as: Each task we perform in our lives has an appropriate medium.

Last month, while lamenting the lack of innovation surrounding magazine apps, I wrote:

Jon Lund reported in October that “there’s not much room for magazine apps” on people’s phones and tablets, considering that the average mobile user has 41 apps on his or her smartphone but opens only eight of them daily.

But maybe users stick to those eight apps simply because those are the eight that work best on their phones. Maybe they don’t bother with magazine apps not because magazine apps suck, but because they don’t use their phones to read magazines.

Maybe it’s simply that magazines aren’t truly viable in any meaningful way except for in the form they’ve taken for hundreds of years. (“Meaningful” in a literary sense, but also in the sense of those often-mentioned new revenue models we’re all still waiting to see take shape.)

Of course, some journalism works just great across devices. Quick text-based blog posts, 500-word essays, two-sentence breaking-news alerts—all are welcome, whether I’m on the couch with my tablet, on the move with my phone or at my desk with my laptop.

But in the vast majority of cases, every medium has its best form of distribution—magazines, yes, but also television, movies, books, etc. A place for everything, and everything in its place. So why is the media industry trying to make itself viable across all platforms? Pick a thing, realize its potential, realize its limitations, and do it well.

I previously said that “unlike many apps, the media’s brand relevance and reputation absolutely hinges on an amazing user experience across devices at all times. In short, it has to be perfect.” I stand by that. But if it can’t be perfect—and we’re realizing that it cannot—I don’t think the next best answer is to half-ass a magazine app, a website and the magazine itself. I think if there is any progress to be made, it will be by using technology to focus on task- and purpose-based distribution instead of trying to be all things to all people (and devices).

Yes, I’m quoting myself back to myself. Is there an echo in here? But almost a year ago to the day, I asked whether magazine apps would be the ruin of publishers, noting that they spend countless dollars producing a product that few readers know or care about. I said that the app field has been leveled, and as an industry the media needed to develop a strategy around apps instead of blindly groping in the dark. In fact, I called for the media to out-and-out rewrite the rules to benefit our business! Rah-rah!

None of that happened.

And here we are, a year later, and things are worse than ever for tablet magazine apps. Eddie Vassallo’s piece on Gigaom today points out that this summer’s iOS7 update made things even worse for publishers, deemphasizing the Newsstand app, hiding its contents and removing its update alerts.

Jon Lund reported in October that “there’s not much room for magazine apps” on people’s phones and tablets, considering that the average mobile user has 41 apps on his or her smartphone but opens only eight of them daily.

Not to be all “I told you so” about it, but that’s what happens when you rely on others’ rules and don’t spend capital inventing or investing in ways to put your product into the public consciousness, be it via technology or user experience or content quality.

In summary, the situation is even worse than it was a year ago, when it was eminently obvious to me — a workaday journalist and decidely amateur observer of the media industry — that tablet magazine apps were sounding the death knell. So how is it not now utterly apparent to those who have the ability to actually instigate change?

Vassallo says that “it’s absolutely understandable that choosing the apparent ‘quick win’ of InDesign-generated apps…or even PDF-wrapper solutions provide a cheap and rapid route to the App store. But it’s been a false economy, and there simply is no time to waste waiting for things to improve,” adding that “It’s time for magazine publishers to abandon the easy options and make the hard decisions that will save their digital titles.”

If I could go back in time and metaphorically shake Vassallo, his clients and anyone else who would listen by the shoulders, I’d do it. With tablet sales skyrocketing yet spending on new media models nonexistent, I am gobsmacked at the lack of leadership across the magazine and newspaper industries. I’m concerned about what the future of media can possibly be if we are collective deer in the headlights as the big rig of technology bears down on us.

I said it a year ago and I’ll repeat it today: We must harness our strengths and lead ourselves forward.

As I mentioned in a previous post, many of my recent freelance gigs have involved reading printed materials on various electronic devices. For several distinct projects, I read the same material on no fewer than four devices at a time, and each had a different layout, different size, different coding language and different interactive elements. This was the case because Apple, Amazon and the rest render their materials in different, proprietary programming languages, and the hardware they’ve created boasts proprietary specs. It has been a major shock to learn how much work and money must to go into optimizing the same printed material for all these devices. And it’s abundantly clear that as publishing professionals, we must do much more work, and soon, in establishing standards for print-to-digital conversion.

“Technology is always destroying jobs and always creating jobs, but in recent years the destruction has been happening faster than the creation.”
—Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the M.I.T. Center for Digital Business (via)

Arguably, this obtuse process is employing me. The technology has, in this case, created a new job: There’s a need for someone to read each article of each issue (or each page of each chapter of each book) on each device. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, because I’m developing quite a little niche for myself as an expert on print-to-digital conversions. But I wonder how long it can last, considering that print media is undergoing huge change at the moment. Momentous, disruptive, industry-wide change that’s happening at a rapid pace, particularly with regard to technology.

We might be powerhouse publishers, but in the tech world we’re just like every other Joe App Maker, 96 percent of whom do not make significant money on their apps. According to a recent article in the New York Times, 25 percent of Apple game app makers made less than $200, with only 4 percent making upwards of $1 million. Granted, random game app makers don’t have the brand recognition or cachet of major publishing houses; neither do they have an overarching, Apple-endorsed app that features their stuff (Newsstand for Apple, if you’re still following me).

But make no mistake, the field has been leveled, and instead of competing only with each other, even the biggest content publishers now also compete with Angry Birds, Twitter, Facebook, travel apps, e-commerce apps, dining apps, coupon apps…the list is endless.

The difference? Unlike many apps, the media’s brand relevance and reputation absolutely hinges on an amazing user experience across devices at all times. In short, it has to be perfect. And in order for that to happen, the same material must be reconceived by its creators multiple times. It seems impossible to believe, but publishers optimize the same product over and over again, incurring all sorts of real costs from designers, editors, producers and programmers with each iteration. (And this isn’t even counting the web producers who conceive it all over again for the online version!) Once you account for these costs, in addition to the so-called legacy costs of creating the print product in the first place, it hardly makes sense even to enter into the realm of app creation for many print products. That’s even if you can get your app sponsored or otherwise monetized, and even if you use Adobe to help you create it.

I realize that the common line of thought is that, like websites, if you don’t have an app presence, you don’t exist. Half a decade ago, this principle propelled the creation of a million new half-assed websites (websites: another print-distribution model without a standard!). But I’d counter that without apps — without content — these devices would be useless. So unless we want to bankrupt the already struggling print media industry further, we must stop playing by the device makers’ rules and rewrite them to benefit our business. We must invent technology that adapts our product (ie, content) to any device at any orientation. We must create or help market forces create a standard we can implement and follow; we must negotiate a better rate than giving away 30 percent of our revenue; we must not “throw in” digital access with print subscriptions.

I know, I know: Nature abhors a vacuum. If we don’t follow suit, we’re nothing. But following hardware makers blindly down dark passageways as our pockets get picked around every corner isn’t a smart strategy, either. In one big way, we are not like Joe App Maker: We possess a hugely powerful medium. We must harness our strengths and lead ourselves forward. A nice start might be to begin taking a stand against having to endlessly tinker with every article in every issue of every magazine, every book, every design.

As Shawn Grimes, the app developer profiled by the Times said: “People used to expect companies to take care of them. Now you’re in charge of your own destiny, for better or worse.” Let’s be in charge of our own destiny.

The Daily, News Corp.’s general-interest iPad news product, shut down this week. Media experts (or perhaps I should say “observers”—I’m not sure the media has any experts anymore) disagree on the specific reasons it failed, but they do seem to agree that it was doomed. The columns I’ve read and rounded up from around the web cite the following three conclusions:

1. Making it available only via iPad and without access to the open social web (readers couldn’t share links) made it a walled garden.

“The Daily’s device-bound nature limited its potential…. Locking into a single platform and not having a web front door limiting sharing and social promotion.” —Joshua Benton

“Publishing for a single platform, whether print, web, or the iPad, is a foolish move, and I think we knew that before The Daily was excised from News Corp.’s balance sheet.” —Ben Jackson

“The product, its content and the conversation around it should have been porous, able to flow in and out of social media platforms and be informed by them. Content should have been unlocked, and made available to subscribers on all platforms.” —Jordan Kurzweil

“More than 54 million people in the U.S. use an iPad at least once a month, but they remain just 16.8% of the population and 22.2% of people on the internet, according to eMarketer. That put a hard cap on the number of subscribers The Daily could acquire no matter how solid its product.” —Nat Ives

“Simply put, The Daily never attracted the revenue required to support a team of 120 people. Launching what amounted to a digital daily newspaper with many of the legacy costs and structures of print wasn’t the best idea.” —Hamish McKenzie

“The Daily should have been run like a startup, a digital business, not a division within a division in a corporation.” —Jordan Kurzweil

“Though it looked quite nice and its content was competent, that content was all-in-all just news and news is a commodity available for free in many other places.” —Jeff Jarvis

“[The term general reader means] a media executive is imagining himself and his friends (you know, normal guys) and intending to produce a bundle of content for that hyperspecific DC-to-Boston-went-to-a-good-college-polo-shirts-and-grilling demographic…. This is not to say that media properties cannot be built with the goal of reaching the mainstream [but successful] sites have been built up like sedimentary rock from a bunch of smaller microaudiences. Layers of audience stack on top one another to reach high up the trafficometer.” —Alexis Magrigal

Whatever the reasons it was closed down, I’m glad someone at least experimented with new ways to produce news. Trying stuff really is the only way to learn. My condolences to those journalists who were laid off. They should consider the no doubt multitude of lessons they’ve learned and call themselves, rather than out-of-work journos, technicians in the lab of digital journalism — scientists who can take the knowledge they’ve gleaned and apply it to the next experiment.

Short post today, in response to Matthew Ingram at GigaOm, who asks, in light of the recent news about the Huffington app going free and The Daily laying off a good chunk of staff: “Are these two isolated cases, or a sign that cracks are starting to show in the content model that publishers have bought into with the iPad?”

Answer: The latter. Slightly longer answer: Publishers only dreamed that the iPad would create a new revenue stream. In most cases, it hasn’t, so back the the drawing board. I’ve said before that I don’t think the business case is there in most cases. A wing and a prayer is not a strategy.

I didn’t really understand a lot of the slides in Mary Meeker’s presentation at D10, which All Things D and Scribd were nice enough to share, but a few sure stood out.

In this pair of slides we can see that tablet (which counts as mobile, compared with desktop) has seen explosive growth.

Now look at the monetization.

What?! Why are we still trying to justify $3.50 CPM on desktops (versus 75 cents on mobile!) when as we’ve just seen, mobile use is on track to surpass desktop (as it already has in India). This is not any one business’s problem (which seems to be a popular opinion with regard to Facebook). It’s every business’s problem, and it’s mystifying how we have been ignoring it. Web publishers are already playing catch-up to web users’/readers’ value versus those from print (compare $10 or so) — let’s not roll over any more than we must. Let’s work on real solutions for monetizing mobile already. Really awesome sales and marketing products that draw in the users who are there already, ready to be shown great stuff.

The thesis of both seems to be that brands are stumbling in the dark to understand user/reader behavior. And just when they think they’ve found the light, after spending hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of dollars, users look, shrug and move on.

From Jason Pontin, the EIC and publisher of Technology Review:

Absurdly, many publishers ended up producing six different versions of their editorial product: a print publication, a conventional digital replica for Web browsers and proprietary software, a digital replica for landscape viewing on tablets, something that was not quite a digital replica for portrait viewing on tablets, a kind of hack for smart phones, and ordinary HTML pages for their websites. Software development of apps was much harder than publishers had anticipated, because they had hired Web developers who knew technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Publishers were astonished to learn that iPad apps were real, if small, applications, mostly written in a language called Objective C, which no one in their WebDev departments knew. Publishers reacted by outsourcing app development, which was expensive, time-consuming, and unbudgeted.

The ground of the Internet is constantly shifting, and brand and businesses have to keep up. It’s very expensive, frustrating and often fruitless to try, but keep up one must.

No one really knows the answers. No one really knows why some apps are successful and others aren’t. Or why communities spring up or fall away. Why sites run hot then cold. Engagement, sure. Great user experience, yes. Brand loyalty. Easy tools. Peer motivation. Curiosity. The urge to be heard. Bragging rights. Belonging. Good deals. FOMO, especially with social.

Like magazines before them, sites and apps, and programming languages, and CMSes, and devices (and on and on) heat up, run hot…but then — poof! Gone. Or at least diminished.

Truly, no one knows. Many people have theories, but that’s all they are, because this technology stuff is brand-new. But it’s important to note that it’s not a waste of time to theorize, build upon that theory (aka experiment), test it and learn from it. As a matter of fact, that’s all we can do: Learn, adapt and with any luck succeed.

Interesting infographic at Mashable. Even though there are >1 million apps out there, it’s hard for app developers to get theirs noticed. (Furthermore, as a user, it’s hard to know where to start.) There’s a lot of talk about apps being the wave of the future, and every company wants to hire an app dev, but it sure seems like that’s not tracking with reality when you consider these facts:

A full 80 percent of apps do not generate enough revenue to support a standalone business (and 68 percent earned <$5K)

The designation “top earner” means your app makes $50K or more, and only 12 percent of app devs reach this point

Top earners spend an average $30K on marketing

For larger brands, app presence is seemingly the new web presence — you have to have one simply to prove to the world that you exist. But I don’t think the business case is there in most cases. Often ideation is slapdash, validation is nonexistent and the UX is subpar. And this is all before the absent marketing that the above infographic details. And even when you have the best visibility, and you somehow price it right, and you have a great product that solves users’ problems, the app still dies of irrelevance when it’s not tested, updated and re-promoted — via so-called influencers or a dedicated product website? — so users can actually find it.